Tayoga laughed.

“Dagaeoga is learning wisdom,” he said.  “A great warrior does not throw his life away.  He will not walk blind through the forest.  I will do all I can with my ears and so will you.”

“I mean to do so.  Do you see that silver flash through the tangle of foliage?  Don’t you think it comes from the waters of Champlain?”

“It cannot be doubted.  Once more we see the great lake, and Crown Point itself is not so many miles away.  It is in my mind that Black Rifle, Great Bear, Mountain Wolf, Daganoweda and our men have been scouting about it.”

“And we might meet ’em coming back.  I’ve had that thought too.”

They walked on toward Champlain, through a forest apparently without sign of danger, and Tayoga, hearing a slight noise in a thicket, turned off to the right to see if a deer were browsing there.  He found nothing, but as the sound came again from a point farther on, he continued his search, leaving his comrade out of sight behind him.  The thickets were very dense and suddenly the warning of Tododaho came.

He sprang back as quick as lightning, and doubtless he would have escaped had it not been for his wounded shoulder.  He hurled off the first warrior who threw himself upon him, slipped from the grasp of a second, but was unable to move when the mighty Tandakora and another seized him by the shoulders.

But in the moment of dire peril he remembered his comrade and uttered a long and thrilling cry of warning, which the huge hand of Tandakora could not shut off in time.  Then, knowing he was trapped and would only injure his shoulder by further struggles, he ceased to resist, submitting passively to the binding of his arms behind him.

He saw that Tandakora had seven or eight warriors with him, and a half dozen more were bounding out on the trail after Robert.  He heard a shot and then another, but he did not hear any yell of triumph, and he drew a long breath of relief.  His warning cry had been uttered in time.  Dagaeoga would know that it was folly, for him also to fall into the hands of Tandakora, and he would flee at his greatest speed.

So he stood erect with his wrists bound behind him, his face calm and immovable.  It did not become an Onondaga taken prisoner to show emotion, or, in fact, feeling of any kind before his captors, but his heart was full of anxiety as he waited with those who held him.  A quarter of an hour they stood thus, and then the pursuing warriors, recognizing the vain nature of their quest, began to return.  Tandakora did not upbraid them, because he was in high good humor.

“Though the white youth, Lennox, has escaped,” he said in Iroquois, “we have done well.  We have here Tayoga, of the clan of the Bear, of the nation Onondaga, of the League of the Hodenosaunee, one of our deadliest enemies.  It is more than I had hoped, because, though so young, he is a great warrior, skillful and brave, and we shall soon see how he can bear the live coals upon his breast.”